ABSTRACT
This work has avowedly twisted its reading of Lyotard towards the problematics of the literary critical academy. It has sought to emphasize the rhetoricity of Lyotard's concern with the figural and to understand his interest in the postmodern as an issue of cultural criticism. It may seem ironic that a third chapter on ‘politics and ethics’ appears to demand no such distortion on my part. In order to understand the apparently immediate (unmediated) significance of the political for literary theory, we should remember the rule of the political as metalanguage in the realm of literary theory that we discussed in Chapter 2. To be blunt, ‘theory’ in the literary academy has become a cloak for the political policing of literary texts, in that the ultimate meaning of all theoretical insights is held to be political. This is hardly surprising, since it shares absolute continuity with the long tradition of literary humanism—except that now the ‘ultimate significance’ of a text is named as a ‘political’ rather than ‘transcendental’ or ‘essentially human’ truth. It is in this light that the justification and relevance of literary theory has been as an interpretative tool to allow us to decode accurately the literal political meaning of texts. Thus, deconstruction has been welcomed insofar as it offers a sophisticated analytical mode that awakens us to the ‘hidden’ political meanings of binary oppositions in cultural texts, dismissed if it tends to undermine our assurance of the decidable reality, the non-rhetorical nature, of political meaning.
